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Thursday, 12 August 2010

Chekhov Country - Hot and hardly visible

Returned from the Russian countryside after almost three weeks. Not exactly a place of Chekhovian atmospheres and moods. Such things are hard to find nowadays in the Russian countryside but with wild fires billowing in the hot summer wind and temperatures of up to 40 degrees, those lazy dreaming Russian summers seem like a thing of the long distant past. Which is something Chekhov was already hinting at in The Cherry Orchard. We left Moscow as the heat started to become unbearable and headed out to a an old soviet style holiday rest complex. It was built as a Pioneer camp for soviet school children but has been converted into a kind of holiday complex for adults. There we escaped the worst of the smog and smoke from the fires. I took the main computer with me and was able to get a considerable amount of work done especially on the Stanislavsky Film "Stanislavsky and the Metamorphosis of Russian Theatre". The script is more or less fleshed out and ready for recording. I have a good narrator in mind, James Langton, an English actor who lives in New York. He has just completed the narration for the other film I have in post production "The Japanese Garden - Art, Landscape and Meaning". The title may appear elsewhere under a different variation until I can settle on a version that I am happy with. James delivered the final text with the corrections I had requested and I can now start to complete the film. Excellent narrator of text and I am very happy with the result. I will work on "Stanislavsky and Metamorphosis" parallel with the Japanese film. Now back in Moscow and coping with the unendurable heat.